Dawn French almost retired from acting earlier this year.
The 59-year-old actress was ready to pack in her career on screen when she had a sudden change of heart after she was approached about playing a passionate cook in the new TV series ‘Delicious’ and fell in love with the script.
Speaking to Digital Spy, she said: "I wasn’t really very interested in coming back in front of the camera again. It kind of lost some of it’s delights for me and I’ve been writing a lot in the last couple of years and I like being solitary and I like being inside my own head and not talking too much all day.
"So I didn’t really want to do anything but Phillippa Giles, the producer, sent me the outline of this script that Dan Sefton has written and I was hoping that this would be another thing that I would say ‘ah it’s not that great’ so then it’s really easy to pass on it, but then I really liked it."
Dawn portrays Gina, who was formerly married to chef and entrepreneur Leo Vincent (played by Iain Glen), in the forthcoming Sky1 four-part drama.
The story, which captured Dawn’s heart, is centred on Leo, who is now married to Sam (Emilia Fox) but has a secret he is keeping from both his current partner and ex-wife – one that will see the two women form unlikely allies.
Dawn said: "I think what I really liked is here was a guy who seemed to be able to write women very well and he was writing interesting aspects of women, it wasn’t clichéd, it wasn’t anything I had particularly seen before. It’s lumpy and difficult and layered and interesting for that reason."
‘Delicious’ will hit television screens on Friday, December 30 at 9pm on Sky1.
Dawn French was going to retire
